


Drown In Darkness Or In Song

by Corvid_Knight, NKMLN



Series: Demonstuck [12]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Demonstuck, Look i made this significantly less sad than it was okay, Multi, Panic Attacks, mild mention of suicide, mild sadstuck?, oof
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 09:09:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17261480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corvid_Knight/pseuds/Corvid_Knight, https://archiveofourown.org/users/NKMLN/pseuds/NKMLN
Summary: Sollux sees ghosts, of people and of traumatic events. This is always kind of a problem, but more so when a friend shows up after being away for a while.





	Drown In Darkness Or In Song

There are things you don't know how to say. Ever since you were a fucking kid, too little to know that pointing at the shit everyone else couldn't see wouldn't make them see it, you've struggled with the words for this. 

(That's how being human works, right? Stumbling over words to let them know how your world and theirs doesn't quite line up? Right?) 

You don't know how to say it. Any of it. You don't know how to explain the difference between the days when you can just _see_ what's coming, black shadows over faces and death coiling around hearts, and the days when you can _feel_ this shit, dark water in your own lungs and dried blood on your face, not just your death but fucking _everyone's_ —god, some days you can't open your eyes for fear that you'll catch a glimpse of your own face reflected, how your fucking eyes reflect the darkness that the thin skin over the face of this world won't contain for you—

_Shit._

Feferi's hand ghosts over your shoulder, just barely touching. It's a reminder to breathe. 

Breathe. 

_Breathe._

(Just part of being human, right?)

* * *

Today's type two. Of course it fucking is. The only positive point for this shit is that you're going to actually get some work done on the coding you should have finished a week ago; it takes both the mess of text on the screen in front of you and the music blasting through your headphones loudly enough to cause permanent hearing damage (if you could actually _be_ permanently damaged, anyway) to even start to drown out the whispers. 

Oh for fuck's sake. Stop calling this shit something it isn't. It's not whispers, it's _screams._ And you can't hear them over the idiot who's currently abusing an electric guitar and destroying his own vocal chords directly next to your ears. Nope. Not fucking hearing it at all. 

Yeah, that's still a fucking lie. Your extra senses are still functioning great despite your best efforts to overpower them. Because of _course_ they fucking are. 

Ugh. Someone's coming. As in, someone that you need to be present to meet. As in, you have to leave your fucking room. 

Well. 

You stall for as long as you can rationalize, which is the two minutes left on the song. It's unfortunate that the sudden silence in your ears coincides perfectly with something intangible and deep red darting across the laptop's screen, and the echo of a scream so anguished that you bite down on your tongue and taste blood before you can stop yourself. 

"Aw, fuck." By the time you reach up to check if you've bitten through it again, it's healed. "There'th no way whoever'th coming ith worth putting thith shit on hold. You know that, right?" 

The wailing dead don't seem to have any opinion on that statement. The cacophony in your head doesn't change, at least. 

You sigh, unplug your headphones without taking them off your ears, and lean over to retrieve the cellphone you've modified into a mp3 player arguably superior to anything Steve Jobs ever patented. There's no fucking way you can face anything outside of this dark room without a backing track.

* * *

The stairs are full of shadows, but most of them are because the bulb that burned out last week still needs replacing. The one that flickers at the edge of your vision as you pass the little end table that Fef picked up at a thrift store is from something less mundane, though; you very gently tip the glass frame with the photo from Eridan's last birthday over to lie on its back. There's not a guarantee that that'll save it from shattering on the floor later, but the shadows flicker away from it as you turn your head; it has a better chance of surviving now. 

Eridan looks up from where he's frowning at a note Feferi left on the table, flashing you a quick smile. "Hit the upswwing?" 

You can't hear the hopefulness in his voice (can't hear his voice at all, really; it's only thousands of days spent coping by drowning everything out with music that lets you read the words off his lips this easily) but you read it off his face, and it makes your heart do that stupid little flip that you're never going to get used to. Or tired of. 

"Nope." Shit, there goes the smile; you just barely manage to kiss him before it disappears entirely. "Thomebody'th coming."

"Who—" 

Blood-red magic flares on the other side of the kitchen before he can really finish that question, and you get a split second to feel smug about the fact that even with all your procrastinating, you _still_ managed to time this shit perfectly. Maybe you'd have more time for that one positive feeling, but the shadows materialize even before Karkat does. 

The music seems to just _stop._

( _there's a sword on the bathroom counter there's bone between your teeth there's a hole in his memories and blood on his shirt and on your hands and in your mouth and oh god please please please no_ )

It hasn't stopped. The screaming is just so fucking loud that you can't hear anything else anymore.

( _there's the death of a god and the death of a cycle that's spanned fucking millennia and shadows shadows shadows you can't breath around the blade in your gut and he's gone he's gone he's GONE_ ) 

The scream isn't in your head. It's in your fucking throat. The pain's not in the shadows, it's _yours._ So fucking much pain, you don't—you can't—

Red and blue crackle around you, the glass picture frame goes flying last Karkat and hits the wall so hard that it doesn't just shatter but _explodes,_ and you turn and flee out the back door, tearing your headphones off and letting them drop somewhere on the floor as you go. Eridan'll take care of them for you.

* * *

There are places you refuse to go. Hospitals, obviously—Fef's ended up there for allergy shit and you couldn't bear to come within fifty feet of the waiting room; the fucking ghosts of the living left there are worse than the true ghosts that every so often realize you can hear them and beg for your help. Graveyards, more for the mourning ingrained into every fucking inch of the earth than the dead beneath it. 

The bookstore in town, with the old man who smiles and suggests books and still hasn't been able to get rid of his wife's oxygen tank even though it's been two years. The library, where you still see the girl who sat in the back corner surrounded by books on birds of prey even though she hasn't been there for months, even though the last time you saw her she had three weeks left before she was going to be hit by a drunk driver. 

That still hasn't shown up on the news. That might be what makes it worse. It still hasn't shown up on the news, and you're never wrong about shit like this. 

Those are the places you can't go. This is the place that you can't stay—waist-deep in salt water, head tipped back to the sky even though you can't open your eyes to see the blue. 

The only thought in your head right now is a coldly logical voice counting down the seconds until you're not going to be able to pull yourself back up onto the rocks without help. That's all there's room for—water in motion scrambles your telekinesis and your second sight, breaks everything up into tiny jagged pieces and then smooths those out like broken bottles dropped into the ocean.

You could let your body go all the way numb, collapse into the surf and fill your lungs with water and be gone until your body washes up somewhere else and your magic heals you enough that you're forced to wake again. You could let yourself go again. Drown. Be gone, if only for a while.

Eridan and Feferi would be _pissed_ if you did that, though, so you swear under your breath and wade back over to the spot where you can climb back up onto the shore.

* * *

Eridan's waiting for you on the steps with a towel; he wraps it around your waist and catches your hands, squeezing gently and leaning in to give you a gentle kiss that feels warmer than it should on your forehead. 

Unsurprisingly, he's frowning when he pulls back. "You're fuckin' freezin'— 

"It'th fucking cold." If you weren't...well, _you_ , the amount of heat you've shed would probably be a problem. As it is, you're just going to need to eat something soon unless you want to lose even more of your already almost nonexistent body fat in the name of not going into hypothermic shock. "And I'm thoaking wet, dumbath." 

Eridan rolls his eyes at the last word, pulling one of your hands up to kiss the back of it like he thinks he's some kind of princely courtier. "Wwant me to fix it?" 

"Yeah." You're in no mood to ask obliquely today, and Eridan doesn't make you ask nicely, either; you tell him that you're sick of being wet and his grip on your hands tightens just slightly, and for the moment before the water soaking your sweatpants just runs down the fabric and into the ground, you see the ocean move behind his violet eyes. 

Then he blinks, and it's gone. The concern there isn't, though. 

"You okay, Sol?" 

You nod and squeeze his hands back. (It's not technically a lie if you don't say it out loud.) "Did KK leave?" 

"He's in the kitchen." 

Shit. You don't know if you're relieved or terrified over that answer. 

Eridan's still looking at you like he expects something else. You press a kiss to the corner of his mouth and let go.

* * *

The shadow's even darker than you thought, you realize as you take the chair across the table from Karkat, but...it's shallow. There's not the depth of imminent demise; this is the fading darkness of something that's done and passed, a pain that he's already moving past. 

God, if you'd seen this when it was fresh you'd be gone. No sanity left. Your equilibrium shivers and cracks a little anyway, just looking at the way the dark screen dulls his bright red eyes. 

You mean to say something snarky and unimportant, but what actually happens is that you just stare at him for a full fucking minute, until he blinks and shakes his head. 

"How bad is it?" Karkat asks you, and thank fucking god that he's never learned any way to be but blunt. 

"It'th—" You have to stop. Take it in for a second. This close its not just voices but the sharp clear sound of metal on mental, the distinct crunch of bones being bitten in half, the distinctive reports of gunshots. "...it'th bad. KK, what the fuck did you _do_?" 

For some fucking reason, despite the shadows almost drowning him, you see him start to _smile._

"Fell in with a bunch of hunters." 

" _What_? When?" 

"Two years ago? Fuck, closer to three now...they're fucking disasters, Sollux, but like. Fucking _powerful_ ones. They're—" 

He blinks and you look too deep into his eyes and you see what they are. Humans and not-quite humans who'll fight just as hard for a demon or a halfblood like you as they would for another human, and—

The image that you get is so clear and bright and tinged with love that the voices actually shut up for a second. Like, a literal fucking second. It's enough of a shock that you end up missing the rest of Karkat's sentence, but for the last word. 

"—Dave." 

"Dave." God, saying his name is a mistake; you wince as the shadows around Karkat roil and twist, showing you the same white-haired guy again, but bloody and still this time. "He'th dead? He'th dead...KK, I'm tho thorry—" 

Shit, you're actually going to cry. That's how much this shit hurts. 

Then Karkat leans across the table and puts his hand over yours, his magic twisting down into your blood, and the shadows around him go from dark to red. It's...an improvement. Maybe. At least now you can see his face, and the growing understanding on it. 

"Sol, he's not dead," Karkat says, and you see the ghost of a memory where Dave breathes out a lungful of air that's half blood and goes limp. 

"I know he fucking died, I can thee that shit, are you fucking thupid?" 

"He's not dead." You don't think you've ever seen Karkat explain something this patiently. "We're okay, I swear. Shit went down, we dealt with it. Not a big deal." 

"Not a—oh my fucking god, KK, you..." 

Shit. You just looked directly at him again, and this time the memory's clearer. More immediate. Louder. The instant lasted forever for him, and you can't shake it off. _Shit._

"Hey." Karkat's magic burrows a little deeper into you, and you blink the shadows away in time to see the confused look on his face. "Still in there, Captor?" 

"Not going anywhere, Vantath." You take a deep breath and try to ignore the death still swirling around his contact with you. "Tho...what happened to you?" 

All you get is a blank look. Shit, that doesn't count as a full query, apparently. 

"Your markth—they're ghotht'th, I think, not—what'th coming, but they're—" Your hesitation is mostly because you can't think through the noise. "KK, it'th fucking everywhere, do you get it? I can barely thee you, it'th..." 

Loud. It's so fucking loud, one long echoing scream that drowns out the clash of swords and the gunshots and you can't—

Breathe. 

"I saw some shit," you can just barely hear him say. "I—I did some shit too, but it's over now, Sol, it's—" 

God, it's never been this loud before, never in your fucking sorry excuse for a life have the ghosts howled at you like this and you know that the only reason it'd be this bad is if he—

Breathe. Just _breathe._

You can't. 

"Sol? Sollux?" 

You snatch your hand away from Karkat, reaching up to cover your ears even though that's never done a goddamn thing, twisting your fingers in your hair and pulling like you can drag any of this shit out by sheer force. It doesn't help. Nothing helps. 

You hear screaming. You hear Karkat say something. You hear Eridan's voice as he gently pulls your hands away from your head and puts your headphones on instead, and when the music crashes into you like something solid you lean forward to lay your head on the support of your arms crossed on the table, and you start to sob.

* * *

Karkat and Eridan leave you in the kitchen to let that pass, and you don't go looking for them once it does. No, when you can bear to lift your head you abscond straight up the fucking stairs, through Feferi's room and to the balcony outside her window. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, just get up there where you can stare at the waves and pretend that you're not listening to anything other than the music. 

You know Eridan's there before he wraps his arms around you from behind, though. You always know. 

Reaching up to pull your headphones down is a decision that costs you more than you want him to know, but you do it without even hesitating. 

"Hey, ED." 

"Hey, Sol." His voice is barely a murmur in your ear, as he nuzzles into the side of your neck, lays cool kisses along the scars there. "He's gone." 

"I know." 

"Course you do." Eridan's arms tighten around you, and you lean back into him instead of against the railing, closing your eyes. "Wwant me to call Fef home?" 

"No." 

"She can't be more than twwenty miles out—" 

"No." 

"She could swwim that and be back before anyone noticed, Sol." 

"I'm fine." Liar, liar, pants on fire. "Thtay here with me?" 

He makes a sound deep in his throat that reminds you of the waves crashing down on the shore, and rubs his face against that place between your shoulderblades that makes you go limp when he kisses it at night. "Nevver gonna leavve you. Not for long." 

(He almost certainly will, one day. You know that.) 

(You really aren't thinking about it. Not now. Right now you just take a deep breath, and concentrate on how the only thing you can hear is the sea.)

**Author's Note:**

> the shadows faded a bit after maybe a month but until then Sollux literally could not be around Karkat without a meltdown


End file.
